


Day is Done

by ama



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, Military, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 23:26:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10581675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/ama
Summary: The funeral was at Arlington. Brad hadn't left any official instructions, but no one ever doubted that it should be at Arlington.





	

The funeral was at Arlington. Brad hadn’t left any official instructions, but no one ever doubted that it should be at Arlington.

(Once, Brad had told Ray that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes pushed on a surfboard out to sea. Ray was pretty sure he had been joking.)

There was some debate over the honors. He was eligible for full honors, with the band and the horse-drawn caisson and everything, but they weren’t sure whether to accept them at first. It seemed like a lot of _fuss_ , and Brad had never been a fussy person, even if he did love the prestige of the Corps. The Colberts asked Ray for his opinion; he recommended they go for standard honors. Eventually they decided they weren’t comfortable refusing the full honors on Brad’s behalf, not when they didn’t know for sure what he would have wanted.

Ray wore a black suit, a grey shirt, and a black tie. When he came down to the lobby of the hotel room, Mrs. Colbert pinned a black ribbon on his lapel, squeezed his arm, and went back to sitting with her daughter. Her husband was standing at the window. They had been polite to Ray—Mrs. Colbert in particular seemed to determined to keep him involved in the planning—but they still held each other at arm’s length. He felt bad about that, but none of them knew what to do without Brad between them.

“No blues?” Nate said when he came down. Ray shrugged.

“Nah.”

“Me neither,” Poke said. He chuckled. “I can’t fit into mine anymore, dog.”

“Ten bucks says Rudy fits into them even better than before.” Three minutes later, Rudy came down, pristine in his blues with his cover in his hand, and Ray snorted. “Fuckin’ Rudy. Hey, anybody got a smoke?”

They all shook their heads. Ray checked his watch.

“Okay. I’m going to head over to the meeting spot. Everybody’s got to be there in twenty minutes anyway.”

He walked out to the parking lot and was just getting into the rental car when someone called, “Hey Ray, wait up!” He turned to find Walt and Trombley jogging after him.

“We’re coming too,” Walt said matter-of-factly. “I hate waiting in there.”

“Yeah,” Trombley mumbled. He kept flashing glances at Ray, nervous looks like he was waiting for ordinance to explode.

“Whatever,” Ray shrugged. He closed the driver’s side door behind him and realized they were hesitating in the parking lot. Of course they were. He rolled down the window. “Walt gets shotgun. Let’s go, I want to stop by a 7-Eleven or whatever they have out here.”

“They have 7-Elevens everywhere,” Walt said as he and Trombley climbed into the car.

They didn’t talk on the way there. Ray put the radio on. He stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought a root beer and a pack of Camels, and smoked two on the way to the administration building that the procession would leave from.

Eventually everyone else arrived. Four marines and two petty officers loaded the plain casket onto the caisson, and a military band led them towards the cemetery. It felt like a huge crowd of people—the band, the honor guard, the escort platoon. All the Recon vets who had brought their dress blues followed directly behind the escort platoon, marching straight-backed and solemn faced. Then came the Colberts, and Brad’s sister and her husband; Katie had taken Ray aside just before it started and quietly asked if he wanted to join them, but he had told her he would rather follow with the rest of Recon, and she had understood.

It was a hot day. Late July. At the end of the thirty-minute walk, the back of Ray’s neck was burning and his feet were sweating and blistering in his leather dress shoes. They turned into the cemetery to the proper space; the white headstone was already set up, and there was a platform for the casket and rows of white folding chairs. The honor guard moved the casket to the platform and stretched an American flag out over it, and everyone sat down in silence.

A military chaplain gave a eulogy. In the back of his mind Ray had been worried that the service might get too religious—a little bit was fine, he thought, if it would help the Colberts, but he didn’t want it to be too preachy. Nothing that would have made Brad roll his eyes. As it turned out, it was fine. The chaplain read a psalm about people who walked upright, who led righteous lives and kept their oaths and Ray thought, _yeah, that’s him_. The he talked for a while about how Brad was a good son and a brother and a friend, and a leader who wouldn’t want anyone to glorify him more than he deserved, and how his memory would be a blessing and an inspiration to those he had left behind. It was a little cheesy, but that was okay. They were at Arlington. It had to be formal.

It was only after he finished that Ray remembered how much Brad always bitched about chaplains on deployment, and he almost laughed out loud. Preachy or not, Brad probably would have preferred a regular rabbi to a chaplain. Oh well. Probably he would have _really_ preferred the kind of fond, irreverent speech people gave at paddle parties.

Fuck. They still needed to have a paddle party. Ray had forgotten about that. He hadn’t given a thought to anything beyond the funeral.

The officer in charge asked the family to stand for the honors, and the entire crowd joined them. Aside from the Colberts, the group was almost entirely marines. They stood out of habit, and the few civilians looked around nervously and joined them. Three marines with rifles gave the three-shot salute. Walt was sitting right next to Ray, and Ray could feel him flinch at the first two shots, but then he took a deep breath and was still for the third.

They hadn’t been able to scrounge up a real bugler, but they had brought a wireless cd player to play Taps, and Ray let his gaze wander. Poke cleared his throat and blinked quickly as the song played on, and Ray suppressed his instinct to make fun of him. Poke wouldn’t mind, and neither would the rest of the guys, but he didn’t think all of Brad’s civvie friends and family would approve. Maybe not the honor guard, either—two of them were Navy, and who knew what petty officers thought of anything, and the other four were a different type of Marine. They looked like they had been carved out of stone. He wondered if they counted as POGs or if it would be offensive to even ask.

When the song finished, the casket attendants began to fold the flag with practiced movements, tucking it into a neat triangle with the stars facing the sky. They passed it to the officer in charge and left, after a final salute. The officer approached the Colberts and started to kneel, when suddenly Mrs. Colbert shook her head and held up a hand.

“No—” she said. The officer froze, and his brow furrowed slightly. “No, I’m sorry, it shouldn’t—”

“Leah?” her husband murmured.

“It should go to Ray,” she told him, and Ray’s heart leapt into his throat. She turned to the officer and said firmly, “Please, give it to him. He’s next of kin.”

She gestured at Ray. The marine hesitated for another second, and Ray could practically see the thoughts racing through his mind. But he recovered quickly, apparently deciding that it wasn’t worth arguing with a grieving mother on the day of her son’s funeral. He straightened fully and crossed the distance to Ray’s chair in two long strides. He knelt and held out the flag.

“On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Marine Corps, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our gratitude for your loved one’s service,” he said in a solemn voice. He was good. He probably said that phrase three times a day, but there was a soft edge to it that made it feel personal.

Ray’s heart was still stuck in his throat. He stared at the white-gloves hands clasping the deep blue fabric, and for the first time he wished that he was wearing his own uniform. Not because he wanted to be wearing it, but because, absurdly, he wanted this stranger to know that he had been in the Marine Corps, too. That this was real for him. That “service” wasn’t an abstract term to him, that he _knew_ what it meant, all the gruesome and banal and dirty details, and that he had been just as willing to do it as Brad, that he had loved Brad even more because he understood, that he…

But he couldn’t think of a way to say it without sounding like an attention-seeking asshole. He swallowed and took a deep breath and nodded, and all he had to do was turn his palms up and the flag was deposited in his hands.

The officer returned to the headstone and announced that the service was over, and everyone stood and started milling about. Some of them went straight to the Colberts to offer their condolences, others nodded at Ray. Most of them just formed little clumps of people around their chairs, unsure of what to do next. Ray remained in his seat, holding the flag. It wasn’t heavy. High-quality nylon. He could probably find a million places in DC where they could frame it, and he could put it on the mantle. Except they didn’t have a mantle. Maybe he could mount it on the wall, or put it in the window of their bedroom. Or in the garage, with Brad’s surfboard and his bike. That was fitting, in its own way, and had the added advantage in that Ray wouldn’t be forced to look at it every day.

Then he jerked out of his thoughts suddenly, and saw the Colberts standing by themselves, holding hands, and wondered what the hell he was thinking. He had to give it back. He stood and walked over to them.

“Here,” he said, holding it out. “I don’t know why you told him to give it to me—it’s yours.”

There was a look on Mr. Colbert’s face that made Ray think maybe he agreed, but the older man only frowned and exchanged glances with his wife.

“We talked it over, before, and we…”

He shook his head. He patted Ray on the arm and shoved his hands in his pockets, and wandered away.

“We want you to keep it,” Mrs. Colbert said firmly. “We have a whole house of things to remember him by. He… he may not have had a long life, but he had a _full_ life,” she said. Her voice wavered. “And I think for you to have that, for it to belong to someone he loved, someone beyond the family… I think it’s important. It’s right.”

“The flag is supposed to go to the next of kin,” Ray protested again. He moved it closer to her, but she only shook her head.

“Ray, really, please. You were together for so long—”

“Six years,” he said automatically, even though it wasn’t true. It would have been six years in September. Labor Day weekend.

“Yes. Brad wanted to marry you, eventually he _would_ have married you, so in my eyes you’re as good as married. And—he was _my_ boy, so it’s my opinion that counts. You’re his family if I say you are.”

Her voice was watery again. Ray had always been so nervous visiting Brad’s parents, because Mrs. Colbert was usually so poised. She wore pearls and pantsuits and had a way of sitting so straight in her chair that you felt like you had to sit up straighter, too. That composure hadn’t broken, exactly—at least not that he’d seen—but he didn’t know what to say to her like this.

“Brad didn’t like marriage,” he replied without thinking. “He thinks it’s a waste of money.”

“It was just that girl who made him think that. He didn’t really believe it,” she said with a disapproving sniff. She cleared her throat. “And as a matter of fact, it’s not an abstract question—I know for sure. He came to dinner with us once and he was annoyed because the two of you had had a fight. I don’t remember what it was. Moving in together, maybe. Something like that.”

“Yeah,” he found himself saying. “We fought a lot about that before I gave in.”

“Sure. Anyway, at one point he said ‘he’s driving me crazy’ and I said ‘well then why don’t you just break up with him?’ because—no offense—at that point all I’d ever heard was how you drove him crazy all the time. He got _so_ angry at me. He said ‘what the hell is wrong with you? I’m going to marry him someday.’”

There was a bittersweet smile on her face. Ray’s throat was dust dry.

“I…”

“Would you have said no?”

“No,” he said hoarsely. She smiled and rested her hands on the folded triangle.

“Then keep it,” she said, but her voice broken on the last two words and she mouthed them more than spoke them.

There was a lump in his throat. Ray’s arm curled in on himself, tucking the flag closer to him, and with the other arm he pulled Mrs. Colbert in for a hug. She let out a shaky sigh and let her head touch his shoulder for a long minute, and then pulled away.

“I think we’re going to head back to the hotel. Katie’s—well, there hasn’t been an announcement, but Katie’s pregnant, and she shouldn’t be out in this weather too much, I think. It’s so swampy here. But it was a beautiful ceremony…”

She wandered away, and most of the other guests decided that was their cue to leave, too. Ray sat back down in the white folding chair and put the flag in the one next to him. He didn’t want to go back with the crowd like some kind of weird reverse processional. Trombley came over and stood by his chair.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“You know I, uh… I never meant anything by it. By what I said.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About gays.”

Ray laughed.

“Trombley, that’s really cute, but if you think I ever cared about any of that bullshit, you’re out of your mind.”

“I know,” Trombley shrugged. “But I dunno, I just thought I should say something. I liked Sergeant Colbert. He was a good guy.”

“Gunnery Sergeant.”

“Whatever. Anyway, I’m gonna head back. Someone said something about a bar.”

“Yeah, sure. Get some, Whopper Jr.”

“All right. See you.”

After most of the crowd had trickled away, he realized that Rudy, Walt, Garza, Poke, and Nate were still there, all standing together in a little knot and pointedly looking just over his shoulder.

“Are you the ‘make sure Ray doesn’t commit seppuku on the headstone’ squad?”

“We don’t really need a whole squad for that,” Nate said with a touch of humor. “Just Rudy. The rest of us figured we’d earned a private moment before we go.”

“Commanding officer,” Poke explained, pointing at Nate. “Best friend,” at himself.

“Allegedly.”

“And the Humvee. We told Garza he didn’t really count but he said he did. Reporter wanted to stay, too, but his editor’s an asshole so he had to catch a flight, and Trombley—well, you saw Trombley.”

“He’s got a thing about death.”

“Yeah. You ready?”

“Yeah,” Ray sighed.

He hadn’t really looked at the coffin or the headstone. It was a plain box, no shiny finishing, no bar for the pallbearers to grab onto. That was a Jewish thing, he’d learned. And the tombstone, of course, was just a plain white rectangle, at a distance no different than any of the others that lay in rows all around them. Ray stopped within four feet of it and stood silently, with the other Recon vets around him. Poke was the only other one in civilian dress.

“My dress blues are in a box in the closet back home,” he said finally, just to have something to say. “Same place as his. That’s why I, uh. Didn’t bring them. I didn’t want to… what do you think they dressed him in?” he wondered out loud. “They put him in the—in the thing before he came back, right? His parents never asked me for the blues so I figured they must have dressed him over there. Do they keep extra blues around or is it just his fatigues? Fucking MOPP suit?” he added with a huff of laughter.

“Who knows, dog,” Poke said ruefully. “Hey, it’d almost be better if it were a MOPP suit. Dress blues are for fancy pricks. MOPP suit’s what a real Devil Dog wears.”

“Yeah.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off the inscription on the tombstone. Bradley J. Colbert, Gy Sgt, US Marine Corps. Brad had been so fucking _proud_ the day he got that promotion. Ray had teased him for it, but every day for weeks Brad had come home in a good mood, because no matter what bullshit he had gone through, being called _Gunny_ all day had made it worth it.

“No,” he said suddenly. “No, it’s not right. He should—he should be in his blues.” The wind whistled through the white rows, but the men with him declined to acknowledge his words. He raised his voice. “The Corps was his fucking _life_. All the stupid protocol and everything, what was the point of learning it if you don’t get the nice uniform? Especially a guy like Brad, you know? Half of us look like dumbasses in our blues, but he was—he was really handsome. Like he just stepped off a recruiting poster. They should have put him in his dress blues and—a sword.” He choked back laughter. “Dress blues and a fucking sword, that's what Brad deserves.”

“Yeah,” Nate said in a soft voice. “Yeah, Ray, he did.”

“Brother, let’s head back,” Rudy suggested. “We’ll find a bar and have a few drinks. I’ll buy the first round.”

“We’ll get a Budweiser for Brad, too,” Poke added.

“Do you think he was doing something stupid?”

“What—”

“I mean, was it an RPG team or was he trying to blow up ordinance in Baghdad? Was it unavoidable or just random or was he trying to be _Brad_?”

“You shouldn’t be thinking of that, man,” Walt said. He put a hand on Ray’s shoulder.

“But it _matters_ , doesn’t it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Nate said calmly. “What matters is that he was a marine, and he died doing what he had to do, and now we have to move on knowing that he’s gone. That’s the only thing.”

Ray shook off Walt’s hand. He wanted them all to back away, but he was hemmed in—there was nowhere to go but closer to the coffin, and he didn’t want to do that.

“I want to know,” he insisted.

“Why, Ray?” Garza asked. “Why d’you want that in your head?”

“Because—because I want to know whose _fault_ it is! Was it command, or was it some fucking pfc grunt, or was he being such a monumental _idiot_ that he—”

Walt was touching him again, and so was Poke, putting an arm around his shoulders, and that was probably Rudy’s hand on his back. Ray wanted to push them away but he was shaking too badly. Walt spoke lowly in his ear.

“You know it wasn’t anybody’s—”

“Why did I leave?” Ray demanded. “For two tours I was right next to him, and then I just—fucking _stopped_? Why? What the _fuck_ did I have to do that was more important?”

His voice was high, too loud in the still cemetery, and the tears he’d been holding back for days were falling, mixing with the sweat on his face. He was going to start blubbering soon. He’d done that the first day he found out, babbling nonsense into his own crossed arms as he sat curled in a ball on their couch, but no one had been around to see him then. The house had been empty—just as empty as it had been the previous two months, but it had felt a million times worse.

This felt even worse. How could anything feel even worse?

“Ray—”

They were all saying his name at once but Ray shook his head and turned around.

“No,” he said. “Let me—I need to—”

He broke through their ranks and started to stride across the grassy lawn. It sounded like some of them didn’t want to let him go—he heard Rudy’s voice calling him still—but Nate kept them back.

 _Follow me_ , part of him wanted to beg, but he ignored it. He wanted Brad to be following him, but that wasn’t going to fucking happen, and if he couldn’t have Brad, it was better to be alone. He kept walking until he couldn’t hear his friends anymore, and then the blisters on his feet started throbbing and he stopped. The headstones around him all had death dates in the early 90s, and there was no one around. He sat with his back against a tree with twisting branches, and cried until he couldn’t breathe anymore.

When that was over, he swallowed and tilted his head back against the trunk.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” he said wearily. Then he lifted his voice in a mocking approximation of a conversation they'd had once, himself half-joking, trying to play it off like he didn't mean anything by it, and Brad quietly serious, getting right to the heart of it. “‘Hey Brad, when do you think you’re going to stop going on deployments? You’ve more than fucking earned it.’ ‘The war can’t last forever, Ray.’ ‘And neither will our sexual peak, Bradley. We waste valuable time every time you leave, you know.’

"‘Gosh, Ray, you’re right. I’m going to tell the president we need to finish kicking haji ass for the sake of your libido, and then we’re finally going to go on that full cross-country road trip I’ve been promising you for three years. No more pussying out, we’re going the southern route through Austin and New Orleans and then take the coast north, and do Chicago and the Rockies and Mount Rushmore on the way back. And apparently we’ll take a pit stop to get _married_ in Massachusetts, so all our illicit motel sex on the way home is actually perfectly respectable. And we’re gonna get a dog and remodel the kitchen finally and I’m gonna get a job where nobody shoots at me and we’ll live happily ever after.’”

He could hear the wind again, but it seemed quiet now. There was nobody in this part of the cemetery, no one to look at him like he was a lunatic or an object of pity.

“That’s all you had to say,” he said finally. “That’s it. Just—just that, and it would have been okay. But you had to be an asshole.” He shook his head and started ripping grass out of the ground between his legs. “I can’t believe you told your mom you were going to marry me. You know she would have made you follow up on it? I can’t believe…”

Ray fell silent. He was thinking about his own mother, how she’d met Brad twice but not since last year, when he’d finally told her his roommate was a little bit more than that. She had taken it… okay. Ray had been convinced that once she met him in person again, once she saw that they were good together, she would be better about it. She had been really sympathetic on the phone when he told her—but that was one more thing he would never be able to cross off the list.

“I didn’t even know I had a list,” he said aloud. “I always thought we were that awesome couple that just _did_ shit, you know? We didn’t put things off. Carpe’d the goddamn diem. No worries, no kids to tie us down, no…” He paused. “Would you have wanted—never mind. Forget it.”

He was talking to thin air. He couldn’t keep doing this—he knew that. There was no way it was healthy, and better catch it before it became a habit.  He took a deep breath.

“I should have been there,” he said finally. “I could have done something. Like that time those Delta assholes were shooting at you. I almost rammed them with the Humvee. I was ready to kill them because they were putting you in danger. I fucking—that was the first time I realized I might be a little bit in love with you. A little bit,” he repeated hoarsely. He was going to start crying again, so he swallowed to try and stave it off. “I loved you so much, baby, I—I know we joked about it a lot, but I really did, I really, really loved you. Fuck. I don’t know what I’m—fuck.”

It was less dramatic crying, this time, just tears spilling silently down his face and some sniffling. When he finished, he stood up and brushed grass off his pants, and lit a cigarette. He wandered back in the direction he’d come from, and eventually made his way back to Brad’s grave. Nate was waiting for him with the flag in his hand.

“The others went to get the car,” he said, standing, as Ray reached him.

“Good.”

“Staying frosty?”

“You can’t say it like that, LT,” Ray snorted. “It’s just the command. _Stay frosty_. Iceman’s rolling over in his grave.”

“He’s not quite in it, yet,” Nate said dryly, and in the back of his mind Ray knew that the fact that they both laughed at that made them terrible people. “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said as they walked towards the main road.

“Not all the time.”

“You did in that factory in Iraq, I think. But everyone smoked then, except what, me and Brad? I kept wanting to say something, in case you all ruined your lungs when we had to chase after Iraqis.”

“You’re no fun.” Ray took the cigarette out of his mouth and blew out a stream of smoke. “Funny you mention that.”

“Hm?”

“The factory. I’ve had that song stuck in my head all day.”

“What song?”

“The one from Lilley’s movie. That was where he showed it to us. You know, the Johnny Cash song?”

He hummed a few bars, but Nate only shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter.” The corner of Ray’s mouth tilted up. “It’s country. Brad probably hated it. I’m, uh… I’m gonna miss him.”

It was the understatement of the century, but Nate didn’t mock him for it. He nodded and touched a hand to Ray’s back, and held out the flag for him to carry. Ray looked over his shoulder one last time to see the headstone, and then the gravel path turned and it was out of sight.


End file.
